Universities and Civilizations

Worldwide Academic Competition and Geopolitics

Franck Leprevost

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781786306685
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119801917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Since the publication of the first Shanghai ranking in 2003, the international rankings of universities have become evermore important. This book examines the evolution of higher education systems and the role of universities in contemporary societies, which are marked by increased competition and tensions.

Investigating whether the dynamism of large universities is an accurate indicator of the intellectual life of their civilizations, Universities and Civilizations systematically analyzes the evolution of universities in several main rankings, from their creation until now. This analysis shows the rise of universities in China and parts of Europe, the decline of American and Japanese universities and the scant presence of universities in Russia, India, Africa and Latin America.

This book suggests an overhaul of traditional models of academic cooperation and exchange in an era of growing international tensions and a time when people and knowledge are increasingly mobile.

1
The Origin of a Triptych

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?

God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me; so take the lively air,

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke – “The Waking”

(Roethke 1966, p. 104)

1.1. The sun is shining in Berkeley

The sun is shining in Berkeley this September 2016. The presidents, vice presidents, and representatives of some of the world’s top universities, however, are not taking advantage of California’s fine weather. Gathered at the World Universities Summit, they are debating the challenges of higher education and high-level research in a pleasantly air-conditioned room with the curtains firmly drawn.

At around 5 p.m., a new round-table discussion ends in the tradition of all events organized by Times Higher Education. Argumentative, consensual and without great surprise. The chairman opens the question-and-answer session. They follow one another. Argumentative, consensual and without great surprise.

Until...

A finger rises in the audience. Its owner, an American professor, speaks. His address recalled that American universities had benefited greatly from public funding during the Cold War. Referring to a book published in 1997 (Chomsky et al. 1997), with chapters by nine academics, he pointed out that this funding, however, had a tendency to melt like snow in the sun, as East-West political relations had warmed up. As tensions between the United States and Russia or between the United States and China return – and are likely to continue in some form or another regardless of who becomes president¹ of the United States – will history repeat itself? Will America’s public universities² (whose direct federal resources have been in steady decline for decades) experience a new golden age and their researchers be given new levels of funding? The answer was as expected: cautious, consensus-seeking, and expressing virtuous hope for a renewal of government funding for American universities, independent of any international tension.

It is natural, however, to extend this question and the idea behind it: more generally, do the international tensions in the world have, or will they have, a global impact on universities, especially those who are global leaders³, some of which were gathered at the Berkeley Congress? Is there a geopolitical reading of the various excellence initiatives that a number of countries have launched in recent years? Beyond the nations themselves, can we go so far as to shed light, in terms of civilizations, on the global landscape of higher education and cutting-edge research? In other words, does the evolution of the ranking of the best universities say something about the vitality of the civilizations to which they belong? Are international rankings becoming a revealing thermometer of a geostrategy of knowledge?

These questions are, of course, so broad that it would be illusory to attempt to give a definitive answer, especially in this section, which is intended as an introductory overview.

1.2. Fukuyama versus Huntington: the revenge of civilizations in the 21st Century

Nevertheless, let us try to give an initial justification for their relevance. The question from the American professor at Berkeley first of all refers to a situation that emerged from the Cold War. This implicitly ended⁴ with the fall of the USSR in 1991, thus putting an end to the “short” 20th Century that began in 1914 with the First World War.

This end was seen as a deliverance that went far beyond what was perceived as the cessation of East-West tensions. For many observers, capitalist and liberal ideology had won, and communist ideology had lost. This victory of one ideology over the other was to mark, in their view, the end of the great conflicts and open an infinite period of near-planetary peace: “the end of history”, to quote Francis Fukuyama’s famous prophecy⁵ about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

However, as early as the summer of 1993, Samuel Huntington published an article in the Foreign Affairs journal entitled “The Clash of Civilizations?” (Huntington 1993). In view of the controversy generated by this article on all continents⁶, the Harvard professor decided to develop his analysis of the world in a more substantial work. He would do so again three years later with his now famous 500-page book: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (Huntington 1996). The reasonable doubt he had in 1993 is no longer relevant in 1996: the question mark at the top of his article disappeared from the title of his book.

The very rich substance of Huntington’s work goes far beyond⁷ the scope of this chapter in describing the genesis of a thought. Let us content ourselves by summarizing the main message here: history is not finished with us; new conflicts of great magnitude will arise; these conflicts will no longer be based on ideologies, but on differences of civilizations and therefore on differences of cultures. Huntington gives the following definition of civilization in the second chapter of Part I of his book:

A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he strongly identifies. Civilizations are the biggest “we” within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other “thems” out there. (Huntington 1996, p. 43)

In the third chapter of Part I (Huntington 1996, pp. 56–78), he develops his argument to contest the very existence of a “universal civilization”, and justifies the fact that the “bigger us” opposing all the other “them” are the civilizations he designates and defines, and that they are strict parts of all humanity. In other words, the whole of humanity certainly distinguishes man from other animal species, but does not constitute a civilization. It merely encompasses civilizations, which is already a broad agenda. Let us jump to Huntington’s conclusion of this chapter:

It would, as Braudel observes, almost “be childish” to think that modernization or “the triumph of civilization in the singular” would lead to the end of the plurality of historical cultures embodied for centuries in the world’s great civilizations. Modernization, instead, strengthens those cultures and reduces the relative power of the West. In fundamental ways, the world is becoming more modern and less Western. (Huntington 1996, p. 78)

Returning to 1989 and 1991, the successive falls of the Berlin Wall, and then of the Soviet empire, did not mean the end of the conflicts. For humanity, they mark the transition from a bipolar world to a multipolar, multi-civilizational and multicultural world. More specifically, the cartography proposed by Huntington structures the world around the following civilizations and flagship countries:

• – Western civilization, whose leading country is the United States;
• – Chinese civilization, whose leading country is China;
• – Hindu civilization, whose leading country is India;
• – Japanese civilization, whose leading country is Japan;
• – Orthodox civilization, whose leading country is Russia;
• – Latin America, without a leading country;
• – Muslim civilization, without a leading country;
• – and (if possible) the African civilization, without a leading country (Huntington 1997, pp. 51–56, including “if possible”).

1.3. The role of universities in the race for global intellectual leadership

As a first approach, let us embrace Samuel Huntington’s reading of the world. However, before looking at the role that universities could play in this reading grid, let us also make the nuance that Régis Debray (Debray 2017, especially pp. 20–27) makes between civilization and culture, which are too often mistaken for one another⁸, our own. Let us give him the floor:

Just as a mother tongue radiates in regional dialects, a civilization de-compartmentalizes the culture from which it comes […]. A culture builds places, a civilization builds roads. It assumes and requires a foreign policy. A civilization acts, it is offensive. A culture reacts, it is defensive. There is no civilization that does not take root in a culture, but a culture does not becom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Preface: Elements of Genesis
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Origin of a Triptych
• 2 Why?
• 3 Where?
• 4 How? From Russia with 5-100
• 5 Conclusion: Analysis and Perspectives
• Appendices
• Notes, Insertions and Tangents
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement